


from whence we came

by haanten



Series: time [2]
Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/M, I love diana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 04:39:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14825412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haanten/pseuds/haanten
Summary: There is something in Diana that she doesn’t know.





	from whence we came

Steve, Diana realizes, is a common name. She goes through a hundred years hearing it said to the wrong person, the wrong face. 

London on VE-Day was explosive, and for the first time in a long time, not literally. Soldiers in the street reunited with sweethearts, or grabbed the person closest to them. Celebrations were common on Themyscira, but the overwhelming relief, the pure abundance of euphoria was something Diana had not seen on this level before. Since coming to Man’s Land, Diana had seen war and suffering, strife beyond what she thought capable in the sensible creations of Zeus himself, and now she witnessed the polar opposite.

Humans tend to live on a spectrum: very good or very bad. Many are unsatisfied in the middle, and, more often than not, are still unsatisfied when they fall to the ends. Their world is black or white, with copious amounts of grey ignored and forgotten. It reminded her of Steve when she had first met him, unfocused yet he held ambition and was on a path for the righteous man while he walked as someone who held no values.

Diana still doesn’t understand humans. They drink until they vomit, and then they drink more. She watches them smile while they fight, compliment with a frown, and say everything is fine with tears in their eyes. She tries to be more like them in her time there, but everything comes out either too honest or too much like a lie. Diana’s words are not her own when she speaks, and they are not Steve’s. They are not Diana the demigod’s, or Diana the Themysciran’s. They feel too much like contradictions as the words form in her mouth, they taste sour and sweet on her tongue, slipping out like honey gone bad. She starts to feel more human. The more uncomfortable she becomes, the more she feels she belongs on Earth.

Themyscira is a boat ride away, but it feels like an endless journey back when she finally does. Hippolyta welcomes her with open arms, and there’s a large feast held the night she returns. Antiope is not there, Diana does not know why she expected her to be, but her heart gives a sickening twinge as she sees another woman training the little ones where Antiope taught her everything she knew. The memory of her floats along the grounds like a ghost as Diana wanders, staring out into a horizon that looks smaller than before. The stars shine down on her, the stories of heroes past light up the stone underneath her feet. There’s a set of stars an insignificant amount brighter than the rest, but it hurts Diana’s eyes to look at. She doesn’t understand why, but she doesn’t really take the time to, anyway.

She takes up a lover in Themyscira. She is beautiful in ways that Diana is not, soft in places that Diana is not. Her eyes hold something that Diana doesn’t recognize, an aged, sorrowful look that is so out of place on such a young face, not thinking that it could be a reflection of her own. She doesn’t know what to do when this happens, only takes her lover’s hand in her own and brings it to her lips, whispering traces of past love onto new skin.

There’s a lot of things Diana doesn’t understand. She knew, she thought, she always had a concrete path carved into the mountainside for her, but it was like an earthquake hit, then a mudslide, and then a whole entire war, and then for no reason someone created a whole new mountain and told her that was her path. They also left no map to get to the new mountain, but that’s besides the point. Her old life in Themyscira was beautifully, painfully simple, a sunrise to wake up to, a sunset to sleep to. England was either never dark enough to see the stars at night, or too cloudy to see the sun during the day. Antiope was not in Themyscira, Steve was not in England. 

Diana says fuck it, and goes through the small villages of European countries to help rebuild. If she feels alienated in the only two places she’s known, she decides to feel comfortable in places she’s never been. She avoids the major cities whether or not they saw that war there. 

In a delicate coastal settlement south from Cork, Diana finds herself to be a piss poor drifter, because she doesn’t think a real drifter spends years in a town. She falls in love with the locals, works hard on a family’s farm in exchange for lodging. The head of the household’s name is Caoimhe and she has two little boys and a little girl, and a baby on the way. Her husband works in the ports of Dublin and sends the money back home for her and the kids. Diana refuses any money Caoimhe attempts to pay her, only tells her to spend it on cloth for the baby, so Diana can make a clearly homemade and amateur jumper and coverall, but Caoimhe cries when Diana gives it to her.

The baby comes in the spring Diana planned to leave. The town’s doctor and midwife are there, and so is Diana, resolving to stay only a couple months until the family is settled, maybe even to see the husband return. They name the child Eamon, and his cheeks are so round and red, Diana led the other children to believe that if they didn’t keep a close eye on him, he’d turn into a tomato while they weren’t looking. They say grace every night, eating dinner by what’s left of the natural light outside and an oil lamp. Diana learns that she must say goodnight to Deirdre before she goes to sleep, or else the little girl thinks she won’t have a good night, and that she’ll have nightmares. The boys, Diarmaid and Eoin, are easier, preferring a kiss on the forehead and the blanket tucked underneath their feet and they’re out.

Diana rises with the sun, tends to the cows first thing, greeting them hello when she walks in the barn and bids them goodbye with gentle pats on the head and promises to be back tomorrow, maybe even later today if they’re good. The chickens cluck until she spreads the feed for them, and then they hungrily peck at the ground in a way Diana will forever find silly for such a creature. There’s always work to be done in the relatively small field of produce the family has. Diana teaches the kids how to pull the tassels off the corn stalks when they’re ready, carrying them around two at a time on her shoulders so they can reach as they walk down the field.

Locals stop and wave when she comes into town for errands, knowing her as a stranger, then Caoimhe’s help, and finally as Diana. She works as hired help for small tasks, fixing sheds, helping repaint signs for apothecaries and bakeries and family run stores, keeping the small payments in a drawstring sack. English peddlers travel through one week, trying to sell ‘an elixir to cure all that ails’ from their cart. The townspeople entertain them, giving them different afflictions to cure, some real, some made up just to take the piss out of the chaps, and Diana scoffs at them with a smile on her face. On her way back to the house, she stops at the creek to fill a small glass bottle with the water to give to the children and tell them it was magical. They spend the next 3 weeks pretending Deirdre is a fairy with a potion for the rest of the humans in the house.

A month turned to two, to four, spring to summer to fall, planting to harvest, and before Diana knew it, Caoimhe’s husband was back. Fionn was a soft hearted man with calloused hands. Caoimhe’s eyes shone whenever she looked at him, and Fionn’s smile always found hers. Diana takes Eamon and the rest of the little ones for a night so Caoimhe and Fionn can go into town for the night. The child wiggles in her arms as she rocks him by the firelight, cooing up at her with bright green eyes and a pouty mouth. His small hands grab at her curls, pushing them around on her shoulders. For a second, Diana is back in Veld, and Steve’s arms are around while they dance in the snow, his hand is on her back guiding her into the hostel, the firelight playing a game across his face, and she’s upstairs and so unbelievably warm as the outside gets colder, and suddenly Steve is up in the air, until he’s not, and Diana is back in the countryside, cradling a baby in the aftermath of a world war, a baby she prays will not see anything of the sort in his lifetime. But if Diana had learned anything about humans in the time she’s spent with them, it’s that their history is forgotten when it’s painful, and they repeat the same things to go through the same exact pain.

She smiles down at the child, his gurgling quieting down into a steady and soft breath as he falls asleep, and if Diana has tears in her eyes, the baby pays no mind and closes his. She places him down into his lifted crib next to the rickety couch and sits beside him, looking into the still strong fire. Like they had it planned, Diarmaid, Eoin, and Deirdre crawl up and onto Diana and the couch, and she covers them all with the knit blankets they dragged in behind them. She tells them stories of Themysciran heroes in Gaelic until they fall asleep, and continues to tell the stories of her sisters in Greek to the stars outside that will listen.

When Caoimhe and Fionn return in the morning, the fire smoulders in the pit and the little ones still sleep. Diana prepared a warm breakfast in the kitchen area, already having collected eggs from the hens and set the table for the little ones. When she saw Caoimhe and Fionn walk in, she pulled out two more, slightly bigger, bowls and greeted them with a soft smile, one that reached her eyes. Caoimhe sat at the table while Fionn went to go wake the children, the laughter of him doing it echoing into the kitchen.

“You know,” Caoimhe says, her voice gentle as it always was, “you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Diana.” Her face was open, and her eyes were almost afraid, as if she thought Diana was going to leave right then.

Diana stopped mixing the hot cereal she was warming on the stove top and placed her hands on both sides of the surrounding counter, not turning to face Caoimhe completely, but turning her head slightly to the side, her curls coming out from behind her ear and falling across her face. “Yes, I know, but I must leave sometime.”

Fionn came in, passing off Eamon to Caoimhe’s open arms, and hoisting Diarmaid up over his shoulder higher as Eoin and Deirdre trailed in behind him. “Really, we’d love to have you longer,” Fionn said, picking up where Caoimhe left off. “The kids love you, and-,” his voice faltered and he shot a quick look at Caoimhe’s kind eyes, “and we love you, too.” 

Diana, as she turned around, felt like her heart had been squeezed by gentle, calloused hands that didn’t quite belong to Fionn. A watery smile was all she really gave in return, but for right now, it was enough. They ate their morning meal with an amicable air as laughter and conversation flowed freely from their chests to their lips and to each other. They thanked the catholic god for their food and family, and Diana thanked her own for where she had ended up.

When evening falls that night, Diana finally tells Caoimhe and Fionn of leaving home, of the war, of Steve, of going back to find that home didn’t feel like home anymore, of love and of loss, of Steve, again, and then Steve some more. She doesn’t understand why his presence, or lack thereof, dominates her story, but she finds herself unable to stop. Caoimhe tells her that her first love will always be the hardest, the most pure, the deepest. 

“The one who takes your heart first,” she says, soothing, wise beyond her years, and so in love that Diana had to smile, “will always hold it with theirs.”

Some part of Diana wants to take that literally, to explain the absolute ache in hers, because it was Steve who took her heart up in that plane with him, and she hasn’t been able to get it back. There’s too many pieces of it scattered around Germany’s battered ground, buried with the dead and stuck underneath the covered trenches. She knows she can’t think literally though, because everything is too abstract when it comes to Steve now. Everything that could’ve been, or should’ve been. The ‘what if’s and the ‘if only’s. And quite frankly, Diana’s too pissed off to think in the abstract right now.

Diana had lived for hundreds of years, and would live for hundreds to come. There should have been no way that Steve qualified as her first love. Her first love will always be on Themyscira, the Amazons, and what they have given her. But an irrational spot deep in her chest, a miniscule dot so condensed with matter it felt like a black hole, throbbed in agreeance, a spot that felt so unequivocally, so illogically hollow without Steve that she couldn’t help but nod along with Caoimhe.

Her heart beat in time with a dead man’s. That’s something she was never prepared to deal with.

Talking about Steve always brings up unsettled ghosts, so she stays up the rest of the night, unable to sleep. She starts her daily work before the sun rises and finishes too early. The grass beyond the fields of the farm are long and soft, swaying in the calm wind. Hands reach out to run through it, touching midlength and following through till the end of the blade. They whisper secrets back and forth through the wind, and Diana wishes she could know what they were saying about her. The sun’s light is subdued by wispy, wistful clouds gliding lazily across the sky. Diana stares out at the horizon and everything it has to offer: the rolling hills, the green trees, the chirping of birds and scurrying of woodland critters, and the rocky, compassionate, violent coast that she feels in her chest more than sees. 

When she brings her eyes back to the sky, the sun is setting, giving brilliant yellows and golds to the life on earth, keeping the pinks and violets for the sky and her stars, and the deep blues for the space behind them. There’s nothing but the clouds and the stars up there for so long until a lone bird flies across, and Diana watches it until it disappears into nothingness and keeps flying. She hears someone walk up behind her, but doesn’t turn to see who it is, she hopes it’s Steve, she knows it’s Caoimhe, and that’s enough for right now. A hand falls onto her shoulder, squeezing slightly, just enough to let her know that she’s there, she’s real, and that’s when Diana starts to cry, and doesn’t stop for a while.

There’s a lot of things Diana doesn’t know, or doesn’t do, but the one thing she knows is that the sun will rise every morning, whether or not she wants it to, and the jury is still out on if she thinks that’s a good or bad thing, but she’s got all the sunrises in the world to make up her mind on that.

**Author's Note:**

> listen it’s been a year and I still can’t believe Diana and Steve invented love in 1918. bicons.


End file.
